Castoriadis,racist and anti-racist ontologies

I Introduction

In ‘Reflections on Racism’ (1997) ¹ Castoriadis appears to situate his interest in understanding and combating racism in broad humanist terms capable of being shared across otherwise competing intellectual traditions:

We recognise the equal value of all human beings qua human beings and we affirm the duty of the collectivity to grant them all the same effective possibilities to develop their faculties. (Castoriadis, 1997a: 19) ²

Against this background of an assumed absence of (the bases for) instituted racism in what would function as a truly autonomous society, Castoriadis focuses specifically on the historically known heteronomous and currently lived partially autonomous societies. In this context, racism is treated as a response at the level of ‘the psychism of singular human beings’ to their heteronomous socialization, in particular, social imaginary significations that (re)produce the exclusion and devaluation of ‘the external other’, that is, of another society or culture:

Racism is an offspring […] of what, empirically, is an almost universal trait of human societies. What is at issue is an apparent incapacity to constitute oneself as oneself without excluding the other, and this is coupled with an apparent inability to exclude others without devaluing and, ultimately, hating them. (Castoriadis, 1997a: 23)

However, in Section II we will argue that, although for Castoriadis racism is indeed a feature of the self-institution of heteronomous societies built on ethnocentrism, his understanding of the phenomenon is a complex one. Insisting that the imaginary significations constituting racism in its specific contexts cannot be understood as the mere ideological work of social groups asserting their position of dominance (Castoriadis, 1997a: 26), he concentrates on two distinct forms of racist fixation on others – as distinct from ‘mere affirmation of the “inferiority” of others’ – at the level of the human psyche. These are hatred of the other as other: (1) as the flip-side of self-love; and (2) as the other side of self-hatred, which Castoriadis analyses respectively as a mode of pseudo-reasoning and as unconscious desire. Castoriadis’s approach arguably belongs to a category of European and non-European thinkers who, linking racism to material relations, understand it as a system. As Bernasconi argues in connection with the writings of Sartre and Fanon on the topic:

To say that racism is a system is to say that violent inequalities are inscribed in worked matter […] in such a way that they are internalized by all parties and thus are constantly reproduced. (Bernasconi, 2012: 355)

In Sections III and IV we move from Castoriadis’s exploration of racist subjectivity at the twin levels of pseudo-reasoning and unconscious desire, to the ontology that underpins the modern European subject’s epistemological deployment of racism in the context of coloniality. ⁷ We aim to show how this move enables us to appreciate: (1) some implications of Castoriadis’s unacknowledged identification of the human psyche with the Eurocentric terms of ‘self-love’ and ‘self-hate’; and (2) the realities of anti-racist radical politics under contemporary conditions of ‘insignificancy’ (Castoriadis, 1997a: 39; 2011: 6). ⁸

II Castoriadis on racism, its source(s) and meaning(s)

In claiming that the others’ inferiority is usually presumed as part of the subject’s affirmation of their own instituted society, Castoriadis observes how the appearance of a different order of signification challenges one’s own sense of creating proper meaning and giving coherence to life and world. He also reads the historical encounter with the other, an encounter that forms part of every society’s self-instituting and of each particular society’s way of creating its world, as evidencing ‘the natural inclination’ to combine society’s ‘exclusion of external alterity in general’ with its devaluation as inferior (Castoriadis, 1997a: 25). While such ethnocentrism does not suffice to constitute a society as racist, societies have historically built on this ethnocentrism to produce ‘hatred of the external other’. For Castoriadis, then, racism can be broadly understood to be socially instituted in so far as (the members of) societies affirm their own truth by devaluing that of others and give rise to hatred of the others. Castoriadis’s observation regarding the presence of racism across human societies has been read as a claim about racism being a ‘universal’ phenomenon (Cowlishaw, 2000: 121) and a ‘natural’ human condition (Vinãr, 2015: 35). However, his point is that instituted societies are ‘extremely likely’ to manifest ‘[r]ejection of the other as other’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 28). A more precise description of his claim is that hatred of the external other characterizes heteronomous and partially autonomous societies, that is, the societal forms that have emerged historically and about which we can make specific critical observations. ⁹

Moving from hatred of society’s external other to the individual subject’s racist fixation on others, whether located beyond or within one’s own society, Castoriadis notes that such fixation combines others’ exclusion as inferior with certain imaginary significations: negative qualities are assigned to others as members of a social group, which are in turn taken to warrant their subjection to negative treatment. Here, the ‘essence of the specificity of racism’ is the constitution of the other as deserving the negative treatment. While the others are ‘considered guilty of being what they are, of belonging to a collective to which they have not chosen to belong’, it is not the absence of choice in their group membership, for example, as defined by skin colour, that decisively defines racism but the impossibility of conversion. ‘Racism […] does not want the conversion of the others – it wants their death’. This is why ‘true racism doesn’t permit others to recant’. Indeed, Castoriadis observes, ‘if racism could content itself with obtaining “forced conversions”’, if the targets of racism were assimilable, ‘we would find racism less abominable’ (Castoriadis, 1997a: 27–8).

If, as Castoriadis insists, in racism proper the other is inconvertible then it also follows that heteronomous society makes the object or target of racism the otherness of the other understood as the subject matter (content), as distinct from the subject (form), of genuine alterity. This suggests that for Castoriadis rejection of the other as other translates what is represented as quantitative difference – there are specific others – into qualitative difference – these others are deserving of negative treatment. In associating the subject’s racist fixation with a certain content, the abovementioned form-content differentiation also has implications for each of the psychical forms of ‘hatred of the other’ that Castoriadis describes.

III Self-loving racism and criminal willing

For Castoriadis hatred of the other as ‘the flip-side of self-love’, meaning ‘cathexis or investment in one’s self’, conforms to a fallacious syllogistic logic:

If I affirm the value of A I also have to affirm the nonvalue of non-A. […] the value of A presents itself as exclusive of any other. A (what I am) is valid – and what is valid is A. What is at best inclusion or belonging (A belongs to the class of objects having a value) fallaciously becomes an equivalence or representativeness: A is the very type of that which is valid. […] Such pseudoreasoning […] would leave room only for different forms of rejection or devaluation. (Castoriadis, 1997a: 28–9)

The syllogistic structure that Castoriadis attributes to hatred of the other as the flip-side of self-love is also the syllogistic structure that Hegel analyses in his Science of Logic as the ‘Third Figure’ of the ‘Syllogism of Existence’ and attributes in his Philosophy of Right to criminal being. Let us consider these in turn.

We note, firstly, in relation to the Figure, I-U-P, consistent with Castoriadis’s observations, the form of this reasoning results in (mis)positioning as universal what is particular, something that is achieved via the implied negative judgement along with the inability of the universal to function other than as predicate. For Hegel, however, it is not only the pseudo-reasoning, that is, the limitations, of this syllogistic form that are worthy of attention. Rather the deeper significance of this Third Figure of the Syllogism of Existence is that it renders explicit the formalism of the syllogistic form; this is posited with the indifference of the immediate contents of the terms – the contingent/subjectively assigned contents qualifying subject and predicate – to their form (Hegel, 1990: 677–9). While this form-content disconnect takes various shapes in modern European subject-world relations, for present purposes we highlight the following. Modern European subjectivity is disassociated from any immediate (unreflective) connections to substantive universal values or, in other words, the subject’s relationship to values assigned a universal form is presumed to be a mediated/reflective one. The modern subject is called upon, not only to adopt values through critical reflection, but also to question their universal application, as Castoriadis also points out, in contrast to pre-modern contexts and discourses, which conflate particular substantive ethical values with the universal, a universal that in turn functions as a kind of (natural) given. To be sure, the purported universality of claims that we might otherwise have taken for granted is thereby exposed to the possibility of rigorous critical scrutiny. This much is consistent with Castoriadis’s interpretation of the emergence of reflective and deliberating subjectivity as a new mode of human being in western modernity. But Castoriadis does not realize the full implications of the observation that in functioning as particular beings in the negative sense of not immediately (unreflectively) identifying with universal values, modern European subjects’ experience of this negative relation has decisively impacted upon the mode of exercising their reflective powers. Currently in modernity our essential nature is thus the very formality that is made possible through a subjectively recognizable and institutionally reinforced exercise of the power of abstraction. In exercising this power, that is, in not immediately identifying with the universal, the subject conforms to what we have elsewhere called ‘the formal universality of particularity’. Taking particularity to be the universal form of subjects and, indeed, units of agency extending beyond human subjects, who do not immediately identify with any substantive universal values, this principle supplies the form that constrains social being – as human psyche and as society – in today’s world (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 2011: 35). This formal constraint on being may also translate into the corruption/destruction of beings under certain conditions.

Secondly, examining the syllogistic form in connection with social relations in The Philosophy of Right, Hegel links one mode of the substitution of the particular for the universal with ‘absolute crime’ (Hegel, 1995: 45). In other words, the syllogistic structure that Castoriadis attributes to hatred of the other as the flip-side of self-love, is also the syllogistic structure that Hegel attributes to criminal being. This is a mode of being that, as we argue elsewhere, characterizes the being of the occupier in relations of coloniality (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 2014: 45–71). Following through the implications of these observations allows for a more complete understanding of Castoriadis’s account of the first psychic form of racism.

On our analysis modern Europe has given rise to an identification of the dominant form of subjectivity with proprietary being understood in terms of a certain person-thing relation (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 2014: 35–40). ¹⁰ In this framework, thinghood and personhood are mutually informing universal orientations. Whereas the former orients the subject toward the universal field of things that may be owned and exchanged, the latter orients the subject toward the universal field of the (potentially) ownable and the gathering of persons understood as owners. Instead of enacting being/becoming through recognitive/affirmative relations with other persons/things, the Eurocentric colonizing imaginary has produced a splitting of this dual orientation toward its world of persons-things. Understood in terms of this practice of splitting, European colonizing subjectivity creates its world in one of two ways: through the orientation of personhood, which erases the otherness of the other as encountered in the context of coloniality, that is, the irreducible Indigenous sovereignties that ought not to be presumed to be internally structured in the Castoriadian terms; or through the orientation of beings as things, which erases Indigenous peoples’ and nations’ irreducible connections to land, Country, and Law (Watson, 2017). Taking place on the sovereign being of the other, the splitting and reconstituting of proprietary being locates European subjectivity as the exclusive producer, distributer, and guardian of universal being/becoming. The Eurocentric practice of splitting or decoupling these two universal orientations toward subject-world relations, a practice that disrupts their otherwise mutually informing dynamics, is the enactment of absolute crime. Through such practice criminality of being claims the ability to be or become exclusively.

The inherent principle of criminal being is the violence of willing itself into being through willing the (human and non-human) other out of their sovereign being. For Castoriadis ‘will or deliberative activity is the reflexive dimension of what we are as imaginative beings’ (Castoriadis cited in Klimis, 2013: 142). This dimension of the subject’s radical imagination is the capacity to intervene reflectively in its self-making and this in turn enables a focus on creating ruptures and breaking the closure of meanings in partially autonomous societies (Castoriadis, 1997a: 160). ¹¹ Yet for European colonizing subjectivity it is no less the practice of willing one’s being into being through consciously or unconsciously, successfully or unsuccessfully, willing the other out of being, that Castoriadis implicitly invokes when appealing to the radical imagination’s power of willing. In being no less a part of the historically novel type of human to which modern Europe has given rise, colonial criminal being serves as the hidden compass of racism and underpins the racist desire to annihilate the specific inconvertible other, which Castoriadis examines.

Moreover, the abovementioned practice of splitting the orientations involving person-thing relations, which thereby gives shape to the modern subject’s capacity to own, is collective in so far as it frames the very enactment of owning in its specificities. Accordingly, as relations of coloniality make clear, this collective criminal willing defines the racist frame for the enactment of criminal being. This is the form or mode of subjectivity that underpins and makes possible the racist subject’s conformity to the contents of the pseudo-reasoning Castoriadis links to the racism of the self-loving singular being. As a form of subjectivity, criminal being not only ‘[misre]presents itself as exclusive of any other’ value in the sense of claiming absolute universality for its own subject matter, but in doing so, it erases the being of the other as a subject (form), and not merely as a subject matter (content) in the way that Castoriadis implies. This then is the deeper ontological significance of the Eurocentric racist psyche when it takes the form of the ‘flip-side of self-love’ even though, as we will suggest in the next section, such racism no doubt conforms to a generalized mode of heteronomous subjectivity as this is described by Castoriadis.

IV Self-hating racism and anti-racist politics

For Castoriadis, the second more profound form of racism practised by the subject concerns ‘hatred of the other as the other side of an unconscious self-hatred’. Self-hatred, according to Castoriadis, is ‘a component of every human being’. It results from the psychical monad’s rejection of the individual into which it has been transformed through its painful encounter with alterity and the world. The individual is the socially fabricated product of an irreducible tension between the singular dimension of the human being rooted in the psyche and the social historical anonymous collective (Castoriadis, 1997a: 143). In so far as the psychic monad opposes ‘all the mechanisms that have permitted the human being to be something (a French Christian peasant, an Arab Muslim poet […])’, the other’s existence is unconsciously experienced as a danger when ‘in the deepest recesses of one’s egocentric fortress, a voice softly but tirelessly repeats “our walls are made of plastic, our acropolis of papier-mâché”’. While for Castoriadis this more profound form of racism constitutes a ‘monstrous psychical displacement […] by means of which the subject becomes able to save the affect in changing its object’, Castoriadis suggests further that its overcoming is the work of a radical politics (Castoriadis, 1997a: 29–31).

Overcoming racism constituted through redirected hatred from oneself to the other may be understood in terms of the ‘thoughtful doing and political thinking’ that underpins the work of creating an autonomous society. In this context to create is to produce new eidos fully embedded in concrete specificities, while the transition to autonomy is linked to radical democratic subjects’ willing the project of autonomy in the knowledge that others also will it (Castoriadis, 1987: 373). Here, the Castoriadian differentiation of the concepts of (autonomous instituting) politics and the (heteronomous instituted) political comes into play to mark the point of transition from heteronomy to autonomy. While for Castoriadis the question of the specific character of the social-historical conditions for the emergence of autonomous subjectivity out of the conditions of heteronomy is a matter for politics – it cannot be pre-designated theoretically –radical transformation is achievable with the redirection of cathexis. ¹² It is on the basis of this broader understanding of politics that Castoriadis insists that radical democratic subjects may consistently take a non-racist, oppositional stance to cultural others’ breaches of universal values while nonetheless recognizing ‘the principle of the incomparability of cultures’ (Castoriadis, 1997: 31).

Granting, for the purposes of our discussion, Castoriadis’s Eurocentric analysis of racism as fundamentally nurtured by psychical self-hate, we turn now to consider what it is open for the participants of an autonomous collective, the radical willing subjects within partially autonomous societies, to say and do in response to those social doings of their proximate cultural others, which they consider as violations of universal values. In this regard, Castoriadis offers what he describes as ‘one simple example’, namely calling out cultural others’ practices of female genital mutilation – he refers specifically to the practices of French Muslim migrants from Africa – without fear of thereby (inadvertently) enacting racism (Castoriadis, 1997: 31). Without diminishing the substantive questions that this example raises, here we limit our discussion to the implications of its deployment by Castoriadis. We can agree that one does not necessarily practise racism in opposing the violence perpetrated in cultures other than one’s own. Nonetheless, contrary to his assertions, Castoriadis’s conceptual framework does not support principled judgements about such questions one way or the other. Indeed, the presumed ‘simplicity’ of the example of female genital mutilation betrays the emptiness of Castoriadis’s appeal to universal categories. We can illustrate this point by juxtaposing another example relating to violence, this time in the white Australian context of coloniality. In 2007 the then Howard government of Australia declared a ‘national emergency’ and passed legislation to impose ‘special measures’ in 73 Northern Territory Indigenous remote communities. While the ‘Intervention’ followed reports of violence in Aboriginal communities, including child sexual abuse, it has been explained as a case of white Australian colonial state-sponsored racist violence towards Indigenous communities. ¹³ Castoriadis’s analysis does not assist us to identify as such the racism that exists against Indigenous Australians as a consequence of colonization, even as it proposes an explanation for why such racism occurs.

Castoriadis’s inability to differentiate clearly between racist and non-racist practices is symptomatic of a deeper problem, which concerns his theory’s inability to distinguish the practices of radical autonomous subjects from the practices of today’s heteronomous subjects. Elsewhere, we have argued that to differentiate the practices of these two modes of subjectivity, Castoriadis appeals unsuccessfully to a fundamental difference in their orientation towards the ‘Chaos, the Groundlessness’, the absence of inherent meaning defining the psyche, society and the world: whereas autonomous subjects are supposed to ‘accept the Chaos as Chaos’, heteronomous subjects misrepresent or refuse to recognize the Chaos for what it is. Despite these claims, exposing the Chaos cannot serve to distinguish Castoriadis’s radical autonomous subjectivity in so far as this same relationship to the Chaos characterizes more widely shared practices that reproduce modern proprietary being and the heteronomous insignificance that Castoriadis associates with neoliberal privatization of the public sphere, capitalism’s reinforcement of consumerism and the absence of any deep desire for responsible institution-making. Paradoxically, proprietary being frees up the power of a radical willing subject to encounter the Chaos of the world, in particular the indifference that Castoriadis attributes to it, and yet proprietary relations do not give rise to ontological creation in the ways this is envisaged for the practices associated with the pursuit of the project of autonomy (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 2018: 37–54).

If this critique holds it helps to explain why Castoriadis may be in a position to give an explanation at the level of unconscious desire for the fact of the existence of subjects’ heteronomous practices, including racism, and yet not be able to differentiate instances of racism from non-racist opposition to cultural others’ objectionable practices. In other words, application of his theory of racism presupposes that one already has the analytic tools for naming racism when it occurs. For this, however, one must rely not only on formal universal principles but also on substantive communal values that supply content for such principles. In our larger work we argue that Castoriadis does not escape an inadvertent reduction of radical democratic subjectivity to the empty formalism that he otherwise opposes. His interpretation of the Chaos of the world leads to a politics of the perpetual questioning of institutions in an effort to avert their heteronomous ossification. Yet modern Europeans must also overcome exclusive dependence on the indifferent if we are to re-connect with that which is unconditionally concerned with us, namely the significance of togetherness.

To receive the significance of communality is to experience the expanding self that defines the member of the genuine collective. If exposure to the Chaos activates communal significance, and not just the subject’s power of radical imagination, if and when singular subjects are also exposed to the unconditional togetherness of the (un)willing collective, then singular subjects’ willing agency is no less permeated by the call of community. Here the subject is at once willing/unwilling (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos, 2018: 55–80). If we understand self-instituting not only as a call to create community but also as the call of community to recreate it, we find that Castoriadis’s analysis of racism ultimately presupposes abstraction from reliance on the call of community. In doing so, it implicitly inadvertently affirms the modern European subject’s formalism and thereby renders the subject incapable of effectively distinguishing racist from non-racist responses to the practices of cultural others. Accordingly, Castoriadis’s preferred anti-racism of asserting universal values while recognizing others’ alterity proves problematic.

V Conclusion

For Castoriadis the desire to annihilate the inconvertible other is at the heart of racism at the level of the psychical subject. But this also means that such racism targets a certain subject matter, a specific content, and not the subject, or form, of alterity itself; racist fixation is supposed to attach to this or that (quality of the) other, but not to the otherness of the other. In so far as this fixation is associated with self-love, a corrupted practice of hatred of the other manifests in colonial contexts as collective criminality; colonial subjects will their being into being by willing the being of the other out of being. Yet contrary to Castoriadis’s assertions concerning radical autonomous subjects’ affirming relationship to the Chaos, when racist fixation is taken to stem from self-hatred, Castoriadis’s theory is unable to effectively differentiate the non-racist radical politics that oppose breaches of universal values found in the practices of cultural others from the racism that accompanies the heteronomous insignificance, which is enacted through the dominant proprietary form of modern subjectivity.